Yesterday morning, James Brokenshire, the Tory minister for security and immigration, was given a rough time of it on the Today programme. Not, as you might guess if you’d tuned out of the immigration debate of late, because of missed immigration targets or border checks being lax. In fact, he was being given a hard […]
How the SNP surge might actually help the Lib Dems in Scotland
It has been assumed by many a political pundit that the Lib Dems are facing an electoral massacre in Scotland on May 7th. Several have predicted that the party will hold only two of their current eleven seats – with some even suggesting that Charles Kennedy will lose his seat, bringing the Lib Dem representation […]
Seriously, who cares if Grant Shapps had a second job as a web marketer
Today the Guardian is running with a story about Grant Shapps having had a second job as a “multimillion-dollar web marketer” overlapping with his time as a Member of Parliament. It’s obvious why the newspaper is running this hard given we’re weeks away from a general election, but I want to talk seriously about this […]
If the neoliberal hegemony is crumbling, what exactly is going to take its place?
Seemingly at least once a week, I read in the Guardian an article about how capitalism is in its death throes. What’s conspicuous by its absence in every single one of these pieces is what exactly is going to replace it as an economic system. In the middle of the 20th century, the Left had […]
The five most unintentionally funny movies of all time
I’ve described previously what I think are the five worst films ever made. After I did so, I got tweets and emails asking me things like, “What about ‘The Room’? That’s terrible.” I had to write back saying something along the lines of, “Yes, ‘The Room’ is terrible. But it’s brilliantly, enjoyably terrible. Unlike ‘Revenge […]
Has Westminster lost the political capital necessary to make the changes society requires?
I was on a panel at the RSA Tuesday evening which focused on the future of health policy. Given the line up contained both Polly Toynbee and Andrew Haldenby, I thought the discussion was going to be more adversarial than it turned out to be. Instead, everyone broadly agreed that the NHS needed to reform […]
There’s a perfectly sensible reason to exclude the SNP from the debates
David Cameron said he would only take part in a debate if it was held before the short campaign started. This was clearly a bid for the prime minister not to have to take part in any debates at all, which is why it’s so refreshing that the Daily Telegraph, often referred to in less […]
Labour need to realise a Lib Dem collapse in May equals a Tory majority
Throughout this parliament, we’ve heard a lot about Labour’s 35% strategy. This mostly involves picking off ex-Lib Dems and getting them to vote Labour. I can see why this was appealing to them. Only problem is, the psephology of it doesn’t quite work out. The Lib Dems have 56 seats at present (they had 57 […]
Philip Hammond speech today demonstrates once again that the Tories “small state” rhetoric is just that
My least favourite politician of all time is Ronald Reagan. In fact, most of my political sensibilities to this day are governed by an anti-Reagan feeling. This is because Reagan epitomises for me both the hypocrisy of the Right, and everything else that annoys me about conservatism at the same time. In many ways, it […]
Labour have allowed themselves to get played into a weird corner on the whole SNP coalition question
I awoke to Chris Leslie on the Today programme yesterday morning. The Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury had come on to discuss why he thinks Labour spending plans are superior to Tory ones. However, he didn’t get to chat about this without first facing a barrage of questions regarding whether or not Labour were […]